Primary source documents are the basis of the study of history. They provide essential details about the setting, timing, and causes of past events, from which historians can make connections and draw conclusions. Modern readers should be aware, however, that primary sources are steeped in the ideologies of their time, and thus reflect the prejudices of their authors. Writers' motivations could have been to persuade their audiences to accept a certain religious or political view, and so the information they present as fact should be analyzed in light of their biases. Even if an author intended to simply describe a situation, his cultural background would have influenced his interpretation of the events he witnessed.

February 3, 2010: We headed to Norfolk Virginia. The highlight of our trip was the tour of the Myers family home, in which we got to see firsthand how people of good social standing lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The excursion this week took place in Norfolk, the city of America's largest naval base.

The traditional story of Jamestown depicts the arrival of unprepared gentlemen colonists with few supplies or skills required for the establishment of a colony. Starvation and disease greatly reduced their numbers in the early years, especially during the famous Starving Time during the winter of 1609-1610. The tale concludes with the arrival of a supply ship at just the right time to avoid Jamestown's failure. Jamestown did struggle in its first few decades due to a number of different factors including disease and unpreparedness among others. To project these early struggles onto the entire history of Jamestown, however, would be a mistake.

Many historians have questioned why the settlers in Jamestown failed (although I would personally rather wonder why they struggled than wonder why they failed, since the settlement obviously lasted close to a century before being abandoned). Many of the theories, especially earlier in the historiography of Jamestown, oversimplified the troubles of the colonists as simple laziness or stupidity. However, a much more complicated interaction of multiple social and environmental influences was at work in Jamestown's struggle to survive.

Authors Carville Earle, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, and Edmund Morgan all viewed the establishment of the colony at Jamestown as a failure. Although Earle and Kupperman agreed that disease contributed to the colony's demise, each author posed his or her own arguments for the causes of failure.

Two separate spheres are the most central image that I can think of to relate to both this week's trip to Jamestown and the questions surrounding the site. The first among these: why did Jamestown fail? There are two distinct threads of the answer which ultimately seem to coalesce. The colonists at Jamestown had both physical and mental ailments that greatly hindered the site's growth. This dichotomy of mental and physical can be applied to many of the other topics we discussed in the course of the day; why Jamestown was important, and polyethnic and multiple class society.